Word: ordeal
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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LAST WEEK freshmen chose their roommates and turned in their rooming group forms. House-mania '87--the now three-week ordeal of selecting a place to live for the next three years--has only just begun. It's a seemingly endless process that forces freshmen to spend their time choosing houses instead of choosing majors and studying house stereotypes instead of studying for midterms...
Even a boisterous crowd of Pudding lovers willing to shell out $50 a seat was unable to generate much enthusiasm for this three-hour ordeal. The audience began getting restless from the start and on one occasion during the second act a particularly loathsome joke yielded a lone cackle from the back...
Greenfeld the father knows his family has been visited by a private tragedy; Greenfeld the writer understands that the ordeal of caring for Noah calls into question everything that passes for normal. Extreme situations clarify the muddles of the middle ground. The author, past 50 and worried about his blocked coronary artery, asks himself, "What do I want out of life?" and answers, " 'Life itself.' Which really, for alleged sophistication of my brain, puts me in Noah's shoes. So why should his life be worth anything less than mine...
Throughout the dark nights of unreason, May never tries to explain the horror. The real horror, he knows, is that it cannot be explained. Nor does he permit himself any self-pity or sensationalism. The first time he panicked throughout the long ordeal, he writes, was when he had to rush his pregnant sister to a hospital three days after their bewildered arrival in Washington. Assisted in that sudden release and encouraged to learn English by British Poet-Journalist James Fenton, whom he had met in Phnom Penh, the author, now 29, gets it all down with a straightforward vividness...
...both. He offers to go first. I let him, hoping I can study his reading and improve upon it. But my turn comes, and I am sure my reading is just as bad, only I stumble in different places. The director, of course, compliments us both. The entire ordeal lasts less than five minutes...